Iklimler (Climates)

Maybe it is not a good idea to watch a film like Climate immediately after The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. But then, it may very well be the perfect fit. For much of Climate I kept thinking “why am I watching this film, have I not seen this story before in a number of Japanese/Korean/French/Chinese films?” The story, that of a man’s inflated ego and twisted impotence in relationships, is as ‘universal’ (i.e. boring) as they come. The story itself is pretty standard—the man breaks up with the woman, the woman goes away and the man go after his old fling, and then he travels far to try to get her back and failed. After exercising the analytical part of the brain heavily just a few minutes before, it was easy to start thinking about the details of the male subject’s construction and realized the subtle but fundamental differences between this and other constructions. Once I arrived at this the film opened itself up to reveal some interesting things. This man, for example, has a kind of casual passive meanness that is absent in the other film I have seen. The other men in other films may be more hapless, more impotent, more violent, or more delusional but none is mean in such a casual and passive way. This observation does not mean that this is what Turkey men are like, or this is how they differ from others; it does represent a Turkish filmmaker’s understanding of a certain type of men in Turkey. The universality of the story makes it an interesting and valuable contribution to the examination of gender relationships and the construction of the male subject. Who says the analytical interferes on the enjoyment of film watching? For me, it makes the film.

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

It is Vancouver International Film Festival again. Let the marathon begin.

It seems that Slavoj Žižek is becoming not just a philosopher who talks about films but also a philosopher who talks about philosophy on films. It makes sense since his philosophy owes Hitchcock as much as Kant and Hegel. One may think film is perhaps the least suitable medium for even the simplest philosophical discourse, much less one as complicated as Žižek’s. After years of studying and using his theories in my own works, I can say that film is no less a suitable medium than the written words. Žižek’s writings suffer from radical jumps. While I would argue that this stylist “fault” is not only an expression of a restless mind but an embodiment of his philosophy itself, it nonetheless make it difficult for one who is used to more linear logical arguments. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema may very well be the beginning of a new of philosophical discourse. Last year’s Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual did not work quite as well because it was in by and large a lecture-like format. Why make a film if it is nothing more than a lecture? This time, with Sophie Fiennes at the helm, the result is more of a film than a recorded lecture. Žižek is filmed at the locations or the sets of the scenes he is talking about. The footage is then cut with the actual scenes to create an essay like format. The use of this technique is not at all sophisticated so it becomes funny at times. Oddly enough, it makes better immediate sense then the reading of his books. Films seem to be more tolerant of Žižek’s intellectual jumps. When the montages match up with Žižek jumps, what he is saying starts to make sense in a way it does not so easily on paper. What he needs is to work on the film techniques, the montages can certain use some more imaginations in its subject matters as well as cutting techniques. It is good to see ‘the Giant of Lubljana’ is still going strong.